The Screengrab : margot at the wedding

Famous Last Words, Round 1 Tiebreaker: Once More, With Feeling

Paul Clark — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Well, I had hoped that last week's tiebreaker round might have decided the winners of this round of Famous Last Words, but alas, it wasn't to be. None of the contenders are backing down, so I'm forced to try again. But first, here are the answers to last week's quotes:

1. “That was a lot of running. I’m out of breath.” ~ This was the gimme, coming as it did from a recent film, Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding.

2. “Come on, chums! Snap out of it!” ~ This final-scene rallying cry was taken from documentary master Humphrey Jennings' sole feature, Fires Were Started….

3. “We’ve been friends a long time now. I never asked a friend to do something he really couldn’t do if I knew he couldn’t do it. Have a nice day.” ~ This one was the stumper, as the film, Peter Yates' Boston noir The Friends of Eddie Coyle, has yet to be released in any video format.

And now, here are the quotes for this week's tiebreaker. Hopefully, these will do the trick:

1. “You with your visions and your dreams.”

2. “You’re the only guy I know who would borrow money to repay a debt that you took to repay a debt.”
“And that’s why you love me.”
“That’s why I love you."

3. “Real life awaits us.”

Once again, I'll be notifying those who are still in contention via e-Mail, but everyone is welcome to play along for fun. Remember, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern next Wednesday. Good luck, and here's hoping that I'll be able to post the winners at this time next week.

DVD Digest for February 19, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

New this week: another Jean-Luc Godard film goes Criterion, and plenty of Oscar-bait (successful and not-so-successful) premieres on DVD.

DVD of the Week: The latest Godard classic to get the deluxe Criterion treatment, Pierrot le Fou is quite possibly the lightest and least didactic of the master's Golden Age output. The film lacks the poetry of earlier films like My Life to Live and Band of Outsiders, as well as the revolutionary fervor of Week End and La Chinoise. In many ways, Pierrot feels like the closest Godard came to making a lark, complete with impromptu musical numbers, gorgeous Cinemascope photography, and Anna Karina at her loveliest. But despite the deliberately minor feel of the film, it's a seminal work, both for the filmmaker and for the period. The two-disc Criterion edition of the film also includes: a new interview with Karina; archival interviews with Godard, Karina, and Jean-Paul Belmondo; the video A "Pierrot" Primer, directed by Godard associate Jean-Pierre Gorin; and a documentary about Godard's personal and professional relationship with Karina.

Also on the Criterion front this week is Alex Cox's Walker, a notorious flop in its day that has become a cult favorite in the intervening years. I haven't had the chance to watch the film yet, so I'll direct you to an appreciation of it by former ScreenGrab editor, and unabashed Walker fan, Bilge Ebiri.

Other new releases on DVD:
American Gangster (Universal, also HD-DVD)
In the Valley of Elah (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Lust, Caution (Universal)
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount)
Michael Clayton (Warner, also Blu-Ray)
Rendition (New Line)

The new Criterions aside, it's looking like a lean week for classics coming to DVD, although I would be remiss if I didn't mention Sony's Blu-Ray-only release of Tom Tykwer's propulsive arthouse hit Run Lola Run. In addition, Sony is releasing a 1992 documentary about old-school criminals like Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel entitled... The American Gangster. I can't imagine why they'd wait until this week to release it.
Finally, new TV on DVD: Universal's Coach: Season 3; Fox's Newhart: The Complete First Season (note: this is the one where he runs the inn, not the one where he's a shrink); and, as promised, the much-anticipated Walker, Texas Ranger: The Complete Fourth Season. I can't imagine there'll be much overlap between people renting this and those renting the Alex Cox Walker, but you never know.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 8

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

My guess is that a lot of the people reading this have at least one screenplay in progress. Might I make a suggestion? You know that Big Secret you've got lurking somewhere in the third act — the traumatic past incident that retroactively explains your characters' troubling present-day neuroses? Ditch it. Lose it. Nuke it. You don't need it. It doesn't help.

Had I made this plea a year ago, perhaps we might all have been spared the ordeal of Sunshine Cleaning, one of the big-buzz titles in this year's Dramatic Competition. Directed by New Zealand native Christine Jeffs, whose mildly promising debut Rain now seems a distant memory (she also made Sylvia, the inert Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow), it stars Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, both in reasonably fine form, as hard-luck sisters who start a new business wiping up the blood and viscera that accumulates at crime scenes. The ick factor makes for a few funny moments, but, alas, screenwriter Megan Holley has more serious issues in mind. Both young women seem devoted to their father (Alan Arkin, reprising his labored shtick from that other Sunshine movie), but Mom is nowhere in sight. Might our heroines possibly be working through some personal issues related to the discovery of a bloody, horrific mess? And isn't that conveeeenient. People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction. Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas. Just let them be however screwed up they are; we'll happily speculate about the cause. (Case in point: the underrated Margot at the Wedding.)

Unfortunately, I failed to get into Sugar, which all reports suggest boasts the same impressive degree of relaxed naturalism as Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's previous Sundance triumph, Half Nelson. But it sounds like the antidote to the Sunshine Cleanings that infest this festival.

The Goriest Year-End List of 2007

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:15:00 GMT

Chicago film critic Jim Emerson has published the first part of his 2007 Exploding Head Awards on his blog, Scanners (not to be confused with Nerve's blog, Scanner). It's far more entertaining than most year-end lists, but we did notice a great deal of repetition. Let's run down exactly what makes Jim's head explode, shall we?

No Country For Old Men made Jim's head explode no less than 13 times. If you were sitting next to him for that one, your shirt definitely needed to be dry-cleaned.

Judd Apatow and friends caused 10 cranial eruptions: 7 for Superbad, 3 for Knocked Up.

Juno appears 3 times, meaning it caused Jim severe hemorrhaging, but he recovered.

Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Zodiac, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Ratatouille and Southland Tales each show up twice. They all gave Jim nasty nosebleeds. Check out the full list, if only to see the winners in such fabulous categories as "Best performance by an inanimate object", "Most cringe-worthy lines" and " Best Supporting Crotch."

FILM GEEK EXTRA: Can you identify the exploding head pictured? (Hint: Not Jim Emerson's.) — Gwynne Watkins

Forgotten Films: Mr. Jealousy (1997)

Peter Smith — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Noah Baumbauch, the writer-director of the new Margot at the Wedding, first made a splash in 1995 with his Gen-X comedy Kicking and Screaming. Ten years later, that film and Baumbach's name had slipped so far into neglect that a major studio thought nothing of recycling its title for one of Will Ferrell's more negligible vehicles. That same year, Baumbach enjoyed a comeback with The Squid and the Whale, and since then Kicking and Screaming has enjoyed the honor of being issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Meanwhile, his sophomore effort, the 1997 Mr. Jealousy (available for home viewing in a no-frills DVD) remains largely unknown. Which is a shame; it's a near-perfect modern screwball comedy that uses Baumbach's favorite subject — the way that intelligent, literate people screw up their relationships — as the basis for some smart satire.

The movie stars '90s indie stalwart Eric Stoltz as Lester Grimm, who's locked in a pattern of gumming up his love life with displays of obsessive jealousy. Stoltz thinks that his current girlfriend, Ramona (Annabella Sciorra), might be the one, which makes it all the more intolerable when he lays eyes on her ex, a cool-stepping novelist named Dashiell (Chris Eigeman), and can't stop wondering about Ramona's past. Lester ends up joining Dash's encounter therapy group, the better to find out whether the guy is obsessing over Ramona and to learn choice details about their past together. Of course, in order to disguise his identity, he has to refrain from talking about his own problems in therapy, so he borrows the problems of his best friend, played by Carlos Jacott. Then, when the process inevitably leaves him feeling more confused than ever, he winds up getting Jacott to join the group so that Jacott can pretend to have Stoltz's problems. Jacott just about steals the movie, especially when, taking on the assignment of pretending to be someone else with the deranged commitment of an idealistic Method actor, he turns up in the group earnestly discussing Stoltz's self-perpetuating neuroses in an outrageously bogus British accent. Mr. Jealousy is much lighter than Bamubach's more recent film, but it could be his funniest work. — Phil Nugent

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: Margot at the Wedding, Southland Tales, Beowulf, Redacted, The Life of Reilly, Bob Balaban, Close Encounters DVD

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Margot at the Wedding: "Somehow plays more like curdled Rohmer than straight Bergman, thanks to Baumbach's precise wit and penchant for droll exaggeration."

Southland Tales: "A great high-concept movie can be summed up in a single sentence, and Southland Tales is too confused to be summed up in two hours and twenty minutes."

Beowulf: "The real star of Beowulf is the technology on display."

Redacted: "It's a formally ambitious approach to a dramatically powerful subject, which makes it all the more disappointing that nothing involving the characters seems even remotely believable."

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition: "Close Encounters foreshadows the movies Spielberg would make in the coming years. It's showy. . . it's far from intellectually challenging, and it's as sentimental as a high-school yearbook."

Q&A: Bob Balaban: "I directed My Boyfriend's Back, in which a teenage boy becomes a zombie and eats some of his classmates, and Parents, in which Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt cannibalize people for meat. I don't know as I'd really call it a theme, though."

Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

After years spent working his way back after the box office failure of his second feature, the underappreciated 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy, the writer-director Noah Baumbach struck gold with 2005's The Squid and the Whale, about the emotional fallout from the divorce of a culturally ambitious Park Slope family. Because Baumbach's own parents divorced when he was a teenager, and because his father, Jonathan Baumbach, is, like the hero's father in his movie, a novelist — his mother is Georgia Brown, who used to be a film critic for the Village Voice — part of the buzz around the movie was always based on assumptions that it was autobiographical. Baumbach tells Dennis Lim that while he was doing promotion for the film, "Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true. I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real." Baumbach's new follow-up, Margot at the Wedding, is another emotionally charged comedy about marriage and family, and it too draws on Baumbach's life, which now includes the experience of having people ask you presumptuous questions about your life based on what they assume they know about you and your family from your work. The new picture's title character is a writer (Nicole Kidman) who has to contend with readers hell-bent on seeing her fiction as a blueprint of her life and the lives of her family, including her sister, whose busted first marriage served as the basis for one of Margot's stories. (The movie is a family project in another way: Margot's sister is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to Baumbach.) So, now that the director can get his projects funded again, does he have any other pipe dreams about the future? "My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical." — Phil Nugent

So Many Movies, So Little Time

Peter Smith — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

There were times this summer when I desperately scanned movie listings for something to lead me out of boredom and into air conditioning, only to find some very slim pickings. I thanked God for Netflix and moved on. But after spending the better part of this month trying to take advantage of all the New York Film Festival has had to offer, I suddenly find myself with an overwhelming backlog of must-see films.

I’ve yet to see Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited or Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The Assassination of Jesse James is surely not going to be the same movie on DVD as it is on film. Michael Clayton would normally be a solid contender for a trip to the movie theater. And how could I possibly pass on the black and white Ian Curtis biopic Control? I’m certainly curious about the Ryan Gosling vehicle Lars and the Real Girl, as well as Noah Baumbach’s sophomore effort, Margot at the Wedding. I was lucky enough to have seen an advance screening of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, and you will not want to miss that sure-footed, tightly woven drama. But somebody is going to lose here, and the Times seems to agree with my sentiments.

I understand Oscar strategy, and the sad tale of the early-season release forgotten, but honestly, how does this make any sense? A couple of these films will likely still be in theaters a month from now, but a greater number will see their runs shortened by the surplus of other options. Not all of these scheduling decisions are based on awards positioning — some tie into film-festival premieres or distribution-company calendars — but if some had been released during the last few months, they would have had a much better chance of getting attention. For the moment I’ve got to determine which one of these movies I’m going to see first. — Bryan Whitefield